


A Bastard's Battle and No-One's Fight

by Onehelluvapilot



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, POV Arya Stark, Post-Episode: s08e03 The Long Night, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War for the Dawn, no beta we die like women
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 16:21:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18720658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onehelluvapilot/pseuds/Onehelluvapilot
Summary: Jon Snow knows nothing about Arya Stark, but he tries to apologize he anyway, and ends up helping himself more.





	A Bastard's Battle and No-One's Fight

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta read and kind of rushed because I got bored and couldn't figure out how to make it better.

Gendry's hammer pounds down in the forge of Winterfell. He works now when he needs to hit things, after Sansa got mad at him for breaking all the trees in the Godswood. Usually he works on lighter stuff, jewelry and the like, so as not to wake all of Winterfell, but that must not be cutting it tonight. No one begrudges him the noise.

It leaves Arya alone though, and when she can't sleep either, she takes to wandering the halls that not too long ago she had run through for her life. She goes past the room of the Lady of Winterfell, and this time, she doesn't go in. There's no crying tonight.

Arya goes to Jon's room. His door, as always, is closed but unlocked, and she lets herself in. Snow is washing his face in the basin. The water must be freezing, as she knows that no servants have been awake in hours to heat it for him.

“Isn't that cold?” she asks, and he looks up and smiles at her through his haunted expression. His skin looks red below his thin beard, as if he's been scrubbing at it.

“I've bathed in colder,” he replies as he sets down the wet cloth. “At Castle Black, I used to end up picking shards of ice out of my hair after washing.” He dries his face and straightens up. “Is everything alright, Arya?”

“Gendry's at the forge,” she replies to avoid the question she doesn't know how to answer.

“Aye, I heard him. Let me guess; your bed is too big and cold without him?”

“No,” the girl says disdainfully. “I don't need a man in my bed to feel safe. It's just… don’t laugh, but I don’t know what to do now that there’s no fighting anymore. And I can’t feel safe without a knife..”

“You don't have to be ashamed of it, Arya,” Jon says gently. “Battle weariness affects all of us. There's a reason Gendry is out making weapons, and why I'm awake as well.”

“But you barely did anything at Winterfell,” Arya says. She knows it's wrong and cruel to point it out, but she can't help it.

“No, I didn't,” he agrees. “And I will regret that for the rest of my life. That isn't the battle, though, that keeps me up at night.”

“Which one, then?” Arya thinks of all the fights she knows Jon took part in, and wonders what could have been worse than the full force of the Army of the Dead, the Night King, and an undead dragon.

“Battle of the Bastards,” Jon says with a huff, sitting down heavily on his bed. The furs that cover it are all messed up, as if he'd woken up thrashing. “Sometimes I feel that I'll never be clean of it.”

Arya had heard of that battle, which had taken place right outside her home. Ser Davos had told her about Rickon's death, which didn't pain her as much as it should. Mostly she felt bad for Jon, forced to watch but unable to stop it, like she did with their father. From Tormund she had learned of the particular brutality of the fight, of being trapped and stabbed at and trapped by mounds of bodies and half-alive men. And about the end, there was no shortage of stories about how Jon had beat Ramsay with only his bare fists. She suspects that the rumors that he caught the arrows in his hands are exaggerated, as even she can't do that, but she wonders how far from the truth they really stray.

“I didn't realize that battles in the far north are so much cleaner, with only snow and frozen soil,” Jon continues. “There's blood, of course, but none of the mud to mix with it, to confuse the soldiers and slow every movement. To make you slip and be trampled below the feet of your own men as they panic.”

Arya pads over on light feet and sits down beside Jon on his bed.

“Do you want to know the real reason I didn't kill Ramsay that day?” he asks softly, like he's telling her a secret. “I wanted Sansa to do it.”

“She deserved to get to kill him,” Arya tries to reassure that brother.

“Aye, she did, but not in the way you're thinking,” Jon says. “I didn't want her to get to kill him. I wanted her to have to kill him. Because I looked up from hitting him, and I saw her standing there, and she was as clean as he had been. A commander should not be clean if his, or her, men are bloody. Before, I had told her that I did not want to fight anymore. I was tired of war. But I fought for her anyway, and she could not be bothered to do the same.” 

He pauses, and sighs, and his head is bowed forward on his shoulders. “I know now that it was not her place, that I shouldn't have expected her to fight in the same way as I, but at the time those were the my thoughts. I wanted her to get blood on her hands, to understand why I hated war. Even though she said I couldn't, I should have protected her, not only from those who would seek to kill her but from becoming a killer herself. I should have killed that bastard while I had the chance.”

“Nobody leaves this world without getting bloody,” Arya says. She understands the sentiment, of wanting to protect those she cares about from Death, but does not say so. “It's better for her to be a killer than to be killed.”

“I suppose so.” Jon straightens his head and his shoulders roll back subtly, and Arya knows she's said the right thing. “She looks at me sometimes, Sansa does, and I wonder why she thinks I stopped. Whether she thinks I saved him for her out of kindness, or if she thinks I looked up, and saw my innocent little sister and she reminded me that there’s still good in the world or some shit like that.”

“I would not call her innocent,” Arya says. “She had me kill Petyr Baelish, and I’m sure there are others. The anger in her heart burns as red as her hair.” She pauses for a second to let Jon contemplate that neither of his little sisters is so little anymore. “She does look at me, though, sometimes, with the same things in her eyes as when she looks at you. With that horror and gratitude, me for who I’ve killed and you for who you didn’t.”

“Is that what keeps you up?” Jon asks. She shakes her head. “What, then? I don’t imagine it's regret, like it is for me.”

“No,” Arya agrees. She has followed her heart in all things, and cannot point to any decisions she made, even ones that she later looks back on as the wrong ones, that did not make her stronger. “Is it better to kill men in battle than in cold blood?” She deflects his question and at once reveals the answer.

“It depends, I think,” Jon says after a minute of considering. “On who you are, on who they are, on the circumstances of the killing or the battle. Of course, it's more honorable to kill and die in battle, but many men do not deserve honor. Ramsay did not, nor the Freys. But it will haunt you either way. If you execute them, you will wish you'd given them a fair shot to fight for their lives. And if you fight them, either in one on one combat or in a battle, the lack of control and possibility of your own death with haunt you.”

Arya does not tell him that he's wrong. She is never not in control, not anymore. At no point has she ever chosen to fight someone that she was not certain she could defeat. When she fights, it is an execution. And when she kills, they deserve to die without honor. Jon speaks from a position of power, of command, which she has never held. His words would be better used on someone like Daenerys, but Arya does not tell him to save his speeches for her.

“I know you wonder if you're a bad person,” her older brother says gently. He's wrong, again. Until now, she's never had a long enough respite from fighting for her life to be able to contemplate whether the things she did to stay alive were unjust. She doesn't interrupt or correct him through. “For killing the Freys the way you did. They may have deserved it, but that doesn't make it any easier, I know. Though it’s hard, I would selfishly implore you, little sister, to kill whoever you need to, however you need to, to stay alive.” She does not say that she will, that she has already, that honor means nothing to No One. “I already lost you once; I could not stand to lose you again.”

“Not could I,” she says. Instead of allowing herself to be pulled into his lap like a little girl when he inevitably hugs her, she takes the initiative and stands up before she wraps him in her arms. From here, he is shorter than her, and she rests her chin on top of his head, his curly hair tickling her neck. Jon Snow may know nothing about her, but he is still her brother. He seems surprised for a second, but then reaches back to hold her. Gendry’s hammer pounds many times in beat with their hearts before they each let go.

**Author's Note:**

> I love feedback, including constructive criticism.


End file.
